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As I read this piece by Sean Kelly at The Monthly yesterday, titled Real Australians: The way we talk about our country needs to change, I became aware of an overwhelming, visceral sadness, a feeling not usually aroused in me by meditations on national identity.

It took a few moments to analyse what this feeling was about. And then I got it. There is no place in the current concept of the “Real Australian” for women. There is no place for me. For my mother. My sisters. My granddaughter, my daughter-in-law, the women I work with, eat lunch with, dance with, exercise with, chat with on social media.

In other words, there is no place in my country’s definition of its identity for me, or for any human with female genitals. Real Australians are men. Real Australian men may squabble amongst themselves about which of them actually are Real Australians, however, they aren’t squabbling amongst themselves about including women in the national identity.

Kelly’s piece examines the racially abusive verbal attack on Senator Sam Dastyari in a pub a couple of evenings ago. Dastyari described his feelings about the attack thus:

“It makes me feel small, makes me feel horrible, it makes you feel kind of terrible and that’s what they are designed to do.”

Dastyari is right: this is exactly what racially abusive attacks are designed to do to the recipient. Without in any way wishing to diminish the abhorrence of Dastyari’s experience, I would like to borrow his words to describe how I feel about being excluded from my country’s national identity. It makes me feel small, makes me feel horrible, it makes me feel kind of terrible, and that’s what it’s designed to do.

I say “that’s what it’s designed to do” because it’s no accident that women are not included in the fantasy of the Real Australian. It cannot possibly have escaped the notice of intelligent, thinking men that the concept is entirely masculine, and yet I have never heard any man point out its exclusionary nature in public discussion. Why not?

Denying us a seat at the national identity table is not entirely unconnected with the apparently entrenched male habit of murdering one of us every week. A stretch! And an offensive one at that! you might protest. However, if you have even limited knowledge of the processes of dehumanisation, you will be aware that refusal to acknowledge other humans as being of equal consequence as yourself, is the first step on the morally abject journey that can end in you killing them.

Women are appallingly abused in Australia, and nobody much cares to discuss it, and it is not a stretch to suggest that the exclusion of women from national identity is a significant contributor to a national perception that our lives aren’t as important, therefore the murderous harms done to us, usually in our homes, are likewise, not that important.

As you might have noticed, my overwhelming visceral sadness has overnight morphed into fury. What are women to Australia, that in 2017 we continue to be excluded from conversations about national identity, and what are men in Australia, that you continue to conduct such conversations as if the Real Australian is unquestionably male, and that is a universal truth?

I’m not usually interested in concepts of national identity, being more inclined to cosmopolitanism. However, in this instance, it’s like excluding family members from membership in the family.

It starts at the top. The people you exclude from the definition of your country’s identity are the people you dehumanise, by the very fact of your exclusion. It’s easier to discount us, abuse us and murder us, if we aren’t Real Australians.

My “Australian Identity” is that of a temporary economic migrant, and never more so than at times like this.

I have citizenship, but of course that can be revoked at any time if the powers that be decide I’ve annoyed them too much. Legal Australian-ness is even more limited and nuanced than the cultural context but is no more easily subject to popular analysis because much of the lore is inaccessible.

Actually, that’s a nasty thought: one of the problems with having MPs who are eligible for foreign citizenship is that that is the test the immigration minister uses to determine whether it’s acceptable to strip Australian citizenship from someone. I hope like hell we’ll never see it come to that, but having a government strip citizenship and deport opposition MPs is actually completely lawful and possible. We should change that law as well as the constitution.

You and me both. As a lecturer in churnalism said on The Conversation the other day in a slightly different context “they end up excluding some of the voices in the country”. Yeah, the coloured people, the non-male ones, the non-rich ones, the non-straight ones, the disabled, the merely not-strong, the foreign-born, it goes on. Gee with a list of exclusions like that it’s amazing we have any actual Australians at all. But we forget, there are actual Australians… but they get excluded first, that’s why we call them the “first Australians”. {cries}.

I find it difficult when I see the carry on of Barnaby Joyce who seems to think that with a National Party membership card and a shady hat he is the very image of a real Australian. A lot of people are not going to identify with what I say next. That’s OK. I’ve lived in some cosmopolitan parts of Australia. But please bear with me as I explain my history – because I no longer recognise the country I live in. I am aged 70+ and I come from working to middle class stock. However, I am immersed in Australian history and literature and the stories (albeit whitefella stories) of the land. My family believes itself to be the only family in Australia descended from someone on The Endeavour. I am a descendant of John Gore, one of three Americans on The Endeavour with Cook. His son, also John Gore, came to Australia in the 1830s and settled near Braidwood in NSW. My great-grandmother who I knew as a child was born there. My grandparents and my great grandmother lived two houses apart and my great-grandmothers house was filled historic memorabilia now bequeathed to the National Museum of Australia. http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/collections/Gallaway-Gore%20collection On the other side of the family tree, I was raised on the Australian poetry and literature in my grandparents home. Their bookshelves were a treasure chest for me. My grandmother loved Will Ogilvie. One of my aunts was a well-known Australian playwright of the 40s and 50s. This sort of background is not the background either of a Barnaby Joyce or a Sam Dastyari. I do enjoy the differences in our society – except for those like the Barnabys and the United Patriots. But, increasingly, I am a stranger in it.

miss eagle,though I’m not of your generation I think many of us have lived through comparatively easy times, between the end of WW2 and the present day.
This apparently sudden turn towards fascism, led by a government I certainly haven’t seen the like of in my lifetime, has taken us all by unpleasant surprise.

I don’t recognise this country anymore either, though whether that is because all this darkness has been repressed up till now, or because the darkness didn’t exist to this extent up till now, I can’t be sure.

We all have our own story, and it’s a shame that it’s seems to be only the blokey stories gain broad coverage … Women make up just over the population of Australia … You certainly have an interesting story indeed, thank you for telling us about it.

Oh this is so, so true Jennifer. All of the national identity in this country has been constructed around men.
All of our cultural history has been been built around “blokes” and “mateship.”
Try to track the family history of your female forebears and you’ll likely find only a name chiselled below her husband’s and marked “Wife of…” on a neglected old gravestone. On my family tree there is no mention of the women except by name… It’s as though they never existed and played no part in the history of this nation.
I am bloody fed up with being a second-class citizen and being constantly silenced for even daring to raise the issue. Moz nails it in her comment about all of the voices that are constantly being shut down in this country.
Personally, after final straws like the Marriage Equality hate-fest and the Manus situation I just feel shame associated with the notion of being “Australian.”
We are being forced to identify with an out-dated, divisive stereotype that has no place in a modern society.
Mad as hell and with you all the way!

Difficult to comment, but the tone has me sympathetic. I can readily identify with a sense of disempowerment and alienation as a bloke and am both relieved and sad that women feel it also.

I tend to see these things through Marxist eyes, eg that the system alienates angers and divides its subjects. This appears to include women.

The Culture Wars are about this exclusion.

Conservatives, with their “pioneer” white armband history, tend to attempt to discredit race and ethnic, blue collar and women’s histories, all of which draw attention to factors ignored earlier, as invalid, that make things seem less “heroic” than Conservatives would think is necessary for patriotism.

Nothing they love more than wedge, but truth must out, whether it be concerning aboriginal massacres, the hard time given migrants, a long history of violence against blue collar workers or some thing like this:

Marxism does give a shit, because Marx, Engels and others DID give a shit. They looked around their shitty world, did some very heavy duty thinking about WHY the world was the way it was and published the results.

Tell me though, why do you think Marxism should only work for white empowered middle class women?

I.m really enjoying the article you wrote about ten million women in the Yemen starving to DEATH (and roughly as many non (eg, male) people, rather than the more divisive and narcissistic stuff here.

Marx and co tried for something grounded in a conjectured materialist and monist reality.

Religion was a diversion based on untested cliches, which is not say we can be sure of Marxist Epicurean metaphysics either, but they are more likely accurate than the superstitions, essentialisms and demonic or sanctified representations that condemn an entity as inherently good or evil devoid of rational justification..Black cats, negros, why, even men!

The Australian character seems to me quite an amorphous thing. It’s often said that we’re larrikins – but it appeared that Paul Keating was a bit too larrikin for us. Patting the Queen on the bum seems to be a no no. In business we’re a nation of branch offices. We couldn’t even charge the multi-national resource companies for the loot the dug up because they spent a few million of our dollars telling us they had to have it for nothing. In National Security we are so anxious we are ‘joined at the hip’ to our barking mad great and powerful friend. I read once that the beetroot was popular because it represented the two things that Australian men liked doing to their women. That joke is from a slightly earlier time, but it probably still says something. I’m Australian, and I’m certain that the High Court would so hold, but I’m not aware of any path that would lead to me being a real Australian. Is it a chimera, as in ‘A thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to achieve’? I’m sure it’s not Barnaby Joyce: what are we, a cartoon? And I certainly hope it’s not the dickheads who abused Sam Dastyari. Just the same, I liked this article. If we’re going to have a conversation about something silly let’s have it gender-balanced.

Barnaby Joyce is not my idea of an Australian, archetype or not. He is a fool, with but slender knowledge of himself – much less anything else. He may be affecting ockerism for his own political purposes; if so he is more clever than I give him credit for.

Women, believe it or not, are Australians. In fact, over 50% of Australians.

The distinction is only the essence of Jennifer’s thesis. Of course that every Australian citizen is Australian. But not every one is *quintessentially* Australian or “Real Australian”. Not if you’re a woman (or if your name happens to be like mine or Dastyari’s. Not even if you’re Aboriginal, which would be funny if it weren’t).

Please try not to be such a hysterical snowflake, it just doesn’t help when men act so touchy and sensitive and over emotional over facts.

So, as the author pointed out women are deliberately excluded from being described as real Australians, you are aware of that as is everybody else, and we will now set about fixing that gross inequality.

No need to reply, you have nothing to add and I don’t need to say anything else Goodbye.

Things is, this stuff proliferating is actually the result of genuine frauds like George Brandis dumbing down msm to the extent that all msm has left to fixate upon is sex.

People have forgotten about twenty million GENUINELY suffering people in the world’s biggest famine, in Yemen and twenty million more round the Horn (whoops) of Africa as real world stories as news is replaced by Hollywood soap generating anxieties that further reinforce the grip the Elite has on the minds of anxious people and politics.

There IS a problem re culture and women? Probably. But is it deserving of so much MORE attention than the suffering slow deaths of the starving millions?

You mean The Greens asking that the ALP also obey the rules they’re so keen for everyone else to obey? I’m not sure I see how that hurts anyone except the most blind ALP supporters. Doing it now greatly reduces the chances that after an ALP win we’d have to do it all again after the attention you fear was focused on the new ALP government by the new opposition. This is a very short version of “long term thinking” paul.

Personally I would no more vote ALP than ALP… the “L”‘s for Liberal and Labour in whatever order you prefer. They’re both deep brown, hard right parties who implement policies that are merely misguided as well as some actively evil ones. But all in the name of immediate party advantage, to the enthusiastic support of big chunks of Australia.

Most important imperative is to get rid of this hateful, destructive LNP regime.

But we must vote with caution against blindly thinking Labor will be the white knights we would want them to be.

They must be forced to face their wrongs and weaknesses which aren’t hard to find in the policy platforms and lack of advocacy for impoverished Aussie Newstart recipients, other struggling welfare recipients, asylum seekers, detainees in those shameful gulags, lack of prompt action against Adani, slow action against filthy coal mining full stop, MMT economic knowledge of economy, etc, etc, etc.

I think the more people say “ALP, right or wrong” the less likely we are to end up with a useful ALP government. We have to hold the buggers to account or they’ll just keep building uranium mines in world heritage areas, building concentration camps and compromising with the Liberals rather than building coalitions with decent people.

We saw that with Kevin’s “BAU, now with more subsidies” greenhouse gas scam. With the side benefit of destroying the environmental value of the small-scale renewable market (RECS).

Yes, they need the votes of the mass of middle Australia, the “what have future generations ever done for me” Aussie arseholes. But they have a choice – build coalitions with the green and left parts of Australia, or burn those groups off and move further right and brown in the hope of picking up enough chequebook votes to make up for it.

Asking the green vote to choose Labour in that situation is unreasonable. Labour did that in NZ for a decade and spent their time in opposition. That changed recently and the difference to policy is dramatic… and welcome to most kiwis. Would you rather have that here, or more of the “slightly less death and abuse than the Liberals” stuff?

Simply saying you disagree isn’t enough. *why* do you think electing the current bunch of right wing browns in the ALP will help? What makes you think they will change after they’re elected if they won’t change before?

I agree with both of you. I have no stomach for the ALP and that demonstrates how intense the turn off as to the LNP is.

Sad watching Lambie go. She did a terrible thing as to Yassmin Abdel Magied, who ended up leaving our country- karma for Jacquie?- but at least she spoke from the guts and quite often rightly on many issues, to the core. Whatever else could be said of her you couldn’t fault that simple and home-spun patriotism.

Speaking of women and stereotypes, one woman I admire is now seeking her way into Federal politics.

Kristina Keneally is following a grand plan, as I see it. Back in 2011 State Labor in NSW would have lost even if a Justin Trudeau clone had been recently made Premier. Their number was up and should have been up 4 years before if the State Libs weren’t so incompetent.

But your humble narrator mapped out a career path for Keneally in about 2011: a Federal seat by 2019, a senior ministry by 2021 and PM by 2025, I think it went.

She may not win Bennelong but it will be a good trial run for a preselection into a safe seat in 2018/19, at the least.

Peculiar enough. Galaxy and Newspoll show Labor is likely to increase its majority; Reachtel continues to underestimate Labor’s vote as it has for years. Palaszczuk (aren’t you glad its not a spelling contest) seems to have been a steady and sensible premier.

Yes, has been deliberately murky for reasons I can only speculate upon. The press are avoiding it like the plague, a sure sign something is up.

I agree Palaszczuk has been less draconian than Cando and Nicholls is shuddersome, but gee, there is the gaping hole to do with Adani, unless it shows how debilitated state governments are when it comes to dealing with Canberra and with huge offshore interests.

By the way, belated return to the original groundings of the thread, via this: